President's message.

The New Year has arrived and the 2007 Legislature is hard at work crafting bills that will affect us as citizens throughout the future. Montana Nurses' Association (MNA) is following proposed legislation closely and will be supporting bills that fulfill our mission of promoting professional nursing practice, standards and education; representing professional nurses; and providing nursing leadership in promoting high quality health care. We hope that you also are engaged in the legislative process by discussing your expertise and point of view with your local legislator. In addition, at the national level, the American Nurses Association (ANA) continues to engage in health care issues that affect us on both a local and national level. I would like to highlight just one of the issues that ANA and MNA has participated in over the past year.

The April/May/June 2006 edition of The Pulse contained an article in which I described the Citizens Health Care Working Group (CHCWG). This group was authorized by Congress through the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement & Modernization Act of 2003 and was charged with answering four vital questions regarding health care in America:

1) "What health benefits and services should be provided?"

2) "How does the American public want health care delivered?"

3) "How should health care coverage be financed?"

4) "What trade-offs are the American public willing to make in either benefits or financing to ensure access to affordable, high-quality health care coverage and services?"

Throughout last year this group held community meetings as well as solicited input from individual citizens via a questionnaire available on its' internet site that could be completed online, or printed and mailed to the committee. I encouraged you to participate by completing the questionnaire and having friends and neighbors complete it as well. Montana was privileged to host one of the "town hall" meetings in late April 2006 in Billings. MNA member Jane Scharff, MN, RN took advantage of this opportunity to participate as a health care consumer in the community forum. She also served as a table facilitator for the discussions.

Scharff's participation, as well as thousands of other citizens from a broad cross section of America, has been summarized in the final report presented to President Bush this past September and subsequently to Congress. Further review of the report will occur by five committees within Congress: the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, and the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The Citizens Health Care Working Group's final report contains six recommendations. The six recommendations in brief are:

1: Establish public policy that all Americans have affordable health care;

2: Guarantee financial protection against very high health care costs;

3: Foster innovative integrated community health networks;

4: Define core benefits and services for all Americans;

5: Promote efforts to improve quality of care and efficiency; and

6: Fundamentally restructure the way end-of-life services are financed and provided.

The following figure depicts the CHCWG's six recommendations with the primary objective achieved through the subsets of security and access, defined core benefits and services, and building a better health system.

Citizens Health Care Working Group Recommendations, (2006, September 29). Retrieved 01/05/06 from Citizens Health Care Working Group Web site: http://www.citizenshealthcare.gov/ recommendations/recommendations.php.

As you can see, many of the recommendations reflect the issues that have been of concern to us in the health care professions. Both the federal and the state government, as well as individual citizens and businesses, continue to grapple with a health care system that is broken in many ways. The above recommendations are part of a much more complex report on how to achieve the overall goal of "all Americans having affordable health care" by 2012. It's a report that comes from Americans themselves and underscores the value that health care is a right, not a privilege or a commodity. Now the challenge is before us as citizens to ensure that this report results in change. Please join me in continuing to make your voice heard as a health care professional, as well as a consumer, by reading the report, (or even the summary) available at http://www.citizenshealthcare.gov/ recommendations/finalrecs.php and by continuing to discuss this issue with Senator Baucus, Senator Tester, Representative Rehberg, Governor Schweitzer and your local legislators. You can make a difference beyond the bedside.

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Linda Henderson, RN